It has been a while since I have posted anything and I must apologise for this and make a promise that I will be much better in 2008.

My excuse is simply that I have been very busy working on initiatives to grow the community of users on www.yourhorseracingnews.com. Currently we have a small active group of users who post stories and discuss what is in them. However to make the site of greater value to these members and potential new users we need to have more active members. After all, the more opinions that are contributing to the site the higher the quality of the information that is on the site.

I am very positive about being able to grow the number of users because of what our figures are telling us. Currently around 25% of all people who come across the site take the decision to join. This is an incredible sign up rate and gives me great confidence that our service is one that people want. The reason a sign up rate like this is not delivering thousands of new members each day is simply that the traffic to the site is not curently high enough. To change this I have been working with a search engine optimisation firm who are improving the workings of our site so that it is easier to find on Google and the like. They are also spreading our name across relevant places on the internet. We should begin to see the results in a few weeks, I will keep you posted.

We have just received some great coverage of our site from the horseracingarticles.co.uk they have included an interview with me in their monthly newsletter that goes to their mailing list of racing fans. If you aren’t on that list you can find the interview here. I will be in touch with more news soon.

Apologies for the long gap since my last post. I have been flat our working on initiatives to grow the membership and the traffic to the site because while we are doing well, there is always room for improvement.

One such initative is the yourhorseracingnews.com button. This is a button that website owners can place on their site next to their content. When a user clicks on it they will be taken straight to yourhorseracingnews.com with the story associated to the button pre-submitted. All they will have to do is add there comments and it can go straight on the site.

We think this is great for both website owners and our users. For our users it means they can share great content they have found on the web even more easily. For website owners there is the benefit of getting links to their content infront of all the yourhorseracingnews.com users generating more traffic for them. It is a cliche but this really is a win win.

The final reason we know it is a really good idea is that other general social news sites such as digg.com and delicious.com already have similar buttons at the bottom of stories on huge news sites such as the bbc.co.uk and the timesonline.co.uk.

If anyone reading this has a website and would like to add the button please click here to get the code.

As we have said all along, the mission of yourhorseracingnews.com is to make it simple for our members to see the hottest racing content on the web. We believe that we have taken another step forward with this today as we have launched our RSS feed in conjunction with Feedburner.

For those that aren’t familar with feeds, here is a quick description. Feeds are simply another way of sharing content from a website. You put a feedreader on your home page or desktop and it will continually update with what is on those sites whose feeds you subscribe to. Feeds offer an abbrieviated text only version of a site. The idea being that this is enough to keep you uptodate with new content and if anything catches your eye you can click through from the feed to the site for the full version. A far for more comprehensive description of feeds and links to all the main feed readers can be found at feedburner.

Back to the yourhorseracingnews.com feed. This offers a live update of the new stories that have got enough votes to make it on the front page. By subscribing (subscribing is the word that is always used with feeds but don’t worry it is free) to our feed you will never miss any of the red hot racing content that our members have voted as worthy of the front page. Click here to subscribe and if you have any feedback on the service or would like to suggest other feeds we could provide please do contact us.

As we continue to grow the yourhorseracingnews.com community we have been getting excellent feedback on the idea and have found some great supporters within the Blog world. Here are some details on a couple of them:

Max Redd is a professional punter of 10 years experience and the man behind the well read I’m Betting On The Redd blog, where he details the wins and, more uniquely, losses he has in his daily battle with the bookmakers. On top of this he has published a succession of in-depth articles on exactly what it takes to be a successful professional gambler. He has recently put a complimentary post about yourhorseracingnews.com on his blog, for which we are very grateful. 

Max also supports Skybluekangaroo.com a betting resource site so the least we could do is put a link to it: Get 100 Horse Racing Betting Systems for FREE at http://www.skybluekangaroo.com/”

We have also been leant support from The Superfecta Blog, a US based blog that writes original articles rich with juicy info about horse racing from as far separated places as the US, Australia and of course the UK.

Have a look at both these sites and stick an article on yourhorseracingnews.com to share what you find with others.

That’s all for tonight but we will keep you informed as we get words of support while we build the community of racing experts using yourhorseracingnews.com.

While building a community is the number one priority, generating traffic is also important. To do this we need links from other sites and search engine ranking which links also help with. The easiest way to build a base of links is to submit to the many directories that are on the web. I have used a service I found on digital point forums to submit to around 40 high ranking directories but have also submitted some manually such as dmegs.com which seems to be among the most professional.

Listed on: SEO Web Directory Link Exchange

It is now 2 days since we quietly launched the site so I thought I would give a very quick update of what we have been doing and how it has been going.

Firstly I purchased a large amount of links for a small amount of money from TNX.net This was really straight forward you can choose the category of site you want your links to appear on and page rank and yahoo backlink score you want. By far the hardest part was writing the text for the adverts. In my day job I have agencies to do this for me - having tried to be creative myself I will go easier on them in future! The links don’t appear for a couple of days so we have not seen any uplift in traffic from this yet. Rest assured I will let you know how it goes. TNX.net make claims about being able to provide top ranks in Google very quickly. I have my fingers crossed that this is true.

I have also set up a group on Facebook to make it easier to spread the word about the site through that huge community.

 Will give the early results of all this work in my next post.

It has been a while coming but I am proud to say that we are finally ready to launch yourhorseracingnews.com

To celebrate this fine occasion, and in lieu of a champagne fuelled party that our start up funds wont run to, I thought I would give an insight into how we plan to market the site. Like any community site, getting yourhorseracingnews.com to be useful and valuable to it members depends on building an active base of members.

We plan to do this in a variety of ways:

1. Purchase relevant links on targeted sites (I have found a great advertising network TNX who make this very easy - more about them in the coming days) as this will help both search engine rank and drive relevant traffic to the site

2. Approach existing web communities of people who are passionate about racing whereever they are to be found: Social Networking sites like facebook (check out our yourhorseracingnews.com facebook group) Forums and Blogs. We wont be doing anything underhand - just openly telling people what we are doing with the site and asking what they think.

3. We will then ask those members who are passionate about what we are doing to help us build the community by inviting their friends to join. To make this easy we have a cool tool from Plaxo. It allows you to go into your hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or any webmail and import your contacts. So if you are reading this because you love the idea of the site, please get inviting and lets build a really powerful community.

4. Once we have created the community the plan is to use traditional non web PR to bring the benefits to a wider audience. More about this later as we want to concentrate on the first job first. No running before we can walk.

It has been a while since my last post as we have been exceptionally busy putting the finishing touches to all the detail that is involved with getting the site up and running. Things like stress testing the functionality, choosing the right server option and negotiating with advertisers take up a lot of time. However we are right on the cusp of launching now so I thought it would be a good time to go into some detail on exactly how the different parts of the site work and what they let you to do.

Front Page News Vs Upcoming News:
This is the crucial part of the site, understanding the difference between these two pages is the key to using the knowledge of all the other users to understand what content is hot and what might not be.

When a user posts a link to some content that they think is interesting it appears at the top of the upcoming news page. If other users read it and decide that it is interesting, they can make it a Runner by clicking on the button to the left of the story. If it is made a Runner by enough users (the exact number of runners required depends on the activity on the site at that time) the story will move to the top of the Front Page where it will remain until another story makes it to the front page when it will move down one place. Stories on the Upcoming News page that don’t get made a Runner enough times will slip into obscurity as new content is posted.

In summary the content on the Front Page is the content that the rest of the community has decided is top quality.

Commenting
It is possible to add your opinion to any post on the Front or Upcoming Stories page. It doesn’t affect the position of the story but can add a lot of interest. You can also rate the standard of each comment by clicking on the plus and minus signs to the right of each post.

Profile:
YourHorseRacingNews.com isn’t trying to compete with Facebook or Myspace but it is possible to create a profile when you join so that people can know a little more about you. You can add as much or as little information as you like. It is also useful to see what other stories a user has posted or commented on. If you think one user usually knows what they are talking about you can go to their profile and see what other contributions they have made.

Tell a Friend:
If you see a post that you think would interest someone you know, you can click on this button, add their email address and they will be sent the story.

Inviting Friends:
The quality of the content and the opinions posted on the site can only be as good as the people using the site and nobody knows who has the opinions to be valued better than our users. So if you want to tell someone about the site simply click on this link enter their email address and a personalized invitation email will be sent to them. Rest assured we will never store their email address if they don’t join.

Karma:
This is the measure of each user’s contribution to the site. Users gain and lose Karma points dependent on their activity. Posting content, commenting, voting, logging onto the site, inviting friends, having friends accept invites and having content voted onto the front page all add points in differing amounts. Not logging onto the site and having stories designated Fallers by other users decrease your Karma score.

The users with the Highest Karma scores can be seen by following the Top Karma link. Once the site gets going we will reward the users with the highest Karma scores with racing related prizes. More details will follow.

I hope that all makes sense. If you want to know more please get in touch through the contact us page or at support@yourhorseracingnews.com

This is the first post on the blog that will accompany www.yourhorseracingnews.com.  We aim to use this blog to keep our users up-to-date on what we are doing with the site and the reasons why we do things, to get feedback on what we are doing and what we could do better and finally to try and give an insight into what it is like to start a web business.

In our first post I just want to introduce ourselves and describe the idea behind the site.

I am Fraser, a 28 year living in London and working in Marketing. I have set up this site with my Brother Ali, an accountant working in Glasgow. We are both passionate about sports and have long wanted to start our own business, so when we had the idea for YourHorseRacingNews.com it seemed to be the right opportunity. The other part of the team are our excellent Argentinian web designers, Panama Bowler, who have brought all the ideas to life.

The idea of YourHorseRacingNews.com is that it provides a way for those interested in horse racing to easily share and evaluate the accuracy of the mass of racing information that is on the web. This of course will help them make more accurate bets and therefore win more money.

The site does this by letting users post a link to any racing story they have found on the web along with a description of why they want other users to see it. If other users agree that it is accurate or useful they vote for it with a simple click. The stories with the most clicks in the last few days appear at the top of the top stories page so you always know where the best info is. There is lots more you can do like commenting, blogging and sharing stories but in essence the site is about using the power of many brains to come up with the best information so that users can place more winning bets.

Have a look at the site by clicking here. We would love to hear any feedback you have on the site, the idea or anything that we are doing. So if you have anything to say please use the contact us link or post a comment here.

Thats all for now but Ali and I aim to post a couple of times a week.

Cheers

Fraser